Page:Punch Vol 148.djvu/439

Miss Chatsworth Plantagenet (of the Chorus of "The Motor-Bike Girl"). "Isn't this war terrible? D'you know, I can't get any decent grease-paint for love or money!"

Dear Charles,—All of us have changed, a little or a lot, under the stress of actual war, but the most dismal case of all is that of our young but highly respected friend, Stevenson. You remember him, of course; simple-minded and kindly-hearted a fellow as you could wish to meet, a lover of small children and dogs, an ardent member of all the Prevention Societies and a peculiarly zealous churchwarden. For some time his cap has been assuming an aggressive, almost vindictive, angle, and his eyebrows grow hourly more ferocious; but so much is forgivable in these days. It is now, however, worse than that. A week ago he informed us, with what I am reluctantly forced to describe as an ugly leer, that he was not accompanying us to the trenches this time, adding that so far from shirking the unpleasant duties of the present he was preparing himself for even more unpleasant purposes in the near future. In short he had secured the office of Master Bombardier of the regiment, and has since devoted all his energies to contriving infernal machines and practising the art of pitching them accurately in tender spots. He is now known amongst us as the Anarchist; is openly accused of all the worst anti-tendencies, and is suspected of having applied to the War Office for special leave to drop the official khaki and assume an independent red in his neckwear. We tell him that his old vocation, Municipal something or other, is gone; but he says that another trade, more sinister and exciting, will be open to him when Peace arrives for the rest of us. His advertisement will read:—"All authority, monarchical, aristocratic or democratic, and all other tiresome restrictions on individual liberty removed with secrecy, ability and despatch. All ceremonies attended and dealt with. Coronations extra." Such a nice quiet fellow he was, too!

It is said that for every man in the trenches there are four outside. But I am told that these others have also their embarrassed moments, and not least the Company Quarter-Master-Sergeants, whose duty it is to keep us armed and equipped, clothed and fed. As modest fellows who dislike being conspicuous, they prefer to work in the dark, and carry up to the trenches our food, drink and fuel at dead of night by means of long-suffering fatigue parties who stumble up from the stores to the trenches as best they can through the mud and shell-holes, hedges, ditches, telephone wires and stray bullets. It is a matter, as I used to write in my legal opinions of long ago, "not wholly free from difficulty," and our industrious "Quarters" prefers, at times, to supervise the loaded procession personally. The other night, what with the rain and wind in addition to the other distractions above indicated, he found it an especially trying operation. Time after time the party broke away into small units, one deviating to the right, another to the left, a third dropping to the rear and a fourth proceeding to a front but, unhappily, the wrong front. With much running hither and thither and much harsh whispering, our Quarters would get them together again and bearing for safety, but the last check of all, occurring when the party were well under fire, was almost, he tells me, fatal. It was in the midst of his searchings on this occasion that he was haunted by the distressed whisper